


Night's Kingdom

by honey_wheeler



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Canon, Attempted Sexual Assault, F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-23
Updated: 2015-06-04
Packaged: 2017-12-27 10:21:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/977624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The end of Jon Snow’s life begins with a rumor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Road North

**Author's Note:**

> Based on the legend of the Night's King.
> 
> According to legend, the Night's King lived during the Age of Heroes, not long after the Wall was complete. He was a fearless warrior, who was named the thirteenth Lord Commander of the Night's Watch. Later he fell in love with a woman "with skin as white as the moon and eyes like blue stars", he chased her and loved her though "her skin was cold as ice", and when he gave his seed to her he gave his soul as well. 
> 
> He brought her back to the Nightfort and after the unholy union, he declared himself king and her his queen, and ruled the Nightfort as his own castle for thirteen years. During the dark years of his reign, horrific atrocities were committed, of which tales are still told in the North. It was not until his own brother, the King in the North, and Joramun, the King-Beyond-the-Wall, joined forces that the Night's King was brought down and the Night's Watch freed. After his fall, when it was discovered that he had been sacrificing to the Others, all records of him were destroyed and his very name was forbidden.
> 
> \- **[The Night's King, A Wiki of Ice and Fire](http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Night%27s_King)**

The end of Jon Snow’s life begins with a rumor.

It’s brought in from the mountains and the icy valleys by Freefolk, spread from camp to hold to wanderer to crow. Jon hears them mention it over meals, or speculating atop the Wall where their guard duties have become a matter of routine rather than necessity now that the White Walkers are well and truly gone. A woman, they say, or more rightly a Lady, living in ruins of Craster’s Keep, making herself a Kingdom in the wild waste of what was once a thriving holdfast. Jon dismisses it at first – it takes little to pique his men’s interest when little of interest ever happens – thinking it will pass like all other rumors and stories. But it does not pass. Instead it grows, Freefolk bringing only more rumor when they come, until the men of the Night’s Watch chatter like the crows they’re called. 

It’s not the chatter that sends Jon North with a ranging party – chatter is often their only purview in matters beyond the Wall now, Mance Rayder governing his people without need for help or interference from the Night’s Watch – but rather the things that are said. The talk unsettles him, bringing long-buried grief welling to the surface, opening wounds long healed. The White Walkers are gone, vanquished by the Dragon Queen. And yet rumors persist of this Lady, a Queen of ice and ruins, cold eyes the color of a frozen lake and skin even colder. She neither speaks nor eats, some say. Others aver that she does both, speaking only to men to tell them of their death at her hands, whereupon she consumes their hearts. Wild fancy, Jon knows. It’s only that he’s learned to never trust in the things he knows.

It’s as well that he doesn’t, because the woman who greets him in the shell of Craster’s Keep is a girl he’d known to be long dead.

She was his sister once. Now he doesn’t know what Sansa is to him. Jon has been told that he could be a Targaryen; he’s been assured he is a true Stark, no matter his parentage. He spent a lifetime thinking himself Ned Stark’s bastard with no thought or question to the truth of it, and without that truth to believe, however wrong, he is a boat adrift without a rudder. From the look in Sansa’s eyes, the expression on her face when she sees him – as if he’d startled her out of asleep and she can’t find the seam between dreaming and waking – Jon thinks she is as unmoored and adrift as he.

“Jon,” she says, only his name, nearly as a question, and it breaks something loose inside of him, some crucial piece of his old life that’s gone forever now. I’ll never leave her side again, some small part of him thinks, and though he immediately tells himself it’s untrue, he fears that it’s not.

Even if she were still his sister, she would not be the sister he knew. It makes him think to rub his eyes and shake his head each time he looks at her, as if the woman she’s become is the product of an addled mind, a film over his vision to be wiped away. Her icy reserve is what discomfits him most; where is the girl who once fostered a wounded bird and made a splint for its wing with twigs and scraps of linen? he wonders. Where is the girl who sang as much as spoke and wore her heart so plain on her sleeve?

Everything around her is destruction, walls reduced to rubble, blackened by soot, thatch and straw strewn into drifts like the snow around them. Jon could almost laugh at the talk that had reached the Wall; he could not imagine a humbler, meaner Kingdom, and pale she may be, but there is nothing dead in the barest pink blush of her cheeks. Even amid desolation and decay she is a Lady, serving them bitter wine in rough-hewn bowls as if she offered Arbor gold in crystal goblets finer than any in King’s Landing.

“I heard you were Lord Commander,” she says, fixing him with those pale eyes, the eyes others called cold and frozen but that seem to Jon to be the color of the sky just after the snow falls.

“I heard you were dead,” he blurts, cursing himself for his bluntness when she flinches, the wine in her bowl slopping out to tint one pale fingertip a bloody red. She sets the bowl down on what’s left of a table, sitting back and folding her hands in her lap, covering that blood-red stain with her palm.

“Lord Baelish probably wishes me so. I ruined all his careful plans when I escaped. I imagine he preferred to call me dead than admit I was his failure.” She shrugs, carefully keeping her eyes from meeting his. “Just as well. I hear tell the Freefolk say I’m not alive even now.” Suddenly her eyes cut to Jon’s, pinning him with her gaze like a mouse snared by a cat’s precise claw. “What is it they call me, Jon? An ice Queen? A Queen of death and nothingness?”

“They call you a Lady,” Jon says, refusing to flinch from her gaze.

“You are as bad a liar as ever, Jon,” she answers, but the words are soft and thawed, and in her eyes there is something Jon could almost call affection.

***

He puts his men to work repairing the keep as best as they can, shoring up crumbling walls, spanning them with rough-hewn logs when they can find them long enough, piling the makeshift roof with planks and rushes to improve upon the meager shelter the keep affords her. The men have been bored, robbed of the life’s mission they expected with no enemy to fight, and they throw themselves into the work with eagerness. Within days the keep looks nearly the same as usual, though only upon glancing inspection; a longer look shows gapped stones and mismatched beams, slivers of sky visible where the rushes run thin.

“It’s no longer a ruin,” Jon says as he and Sansa stand atop a nearby hill and watch, Ghost at Sansa’s side, a position he’s not left since the moment they arrived.

“No,” Sansa agrees, the corner of her mouth quirking upwards. “It’s very nearly a hovel now.” Jon laughs too loudly, smiles too wide.

“The men of the Night’s Watch are at your service, my Queen,” he says, bowing with a flourish so extravagant that it startles Ghost into a rough noise, the wolf eyeing him suspiciously until Sansa sets an absent hand at his ruff.

“I am no more a Queen than you are a King,” she says, but that softness is in her voice again, and her wry smile relaxes into something sweeter. For a moment they look at each other, each seeing the past perhaps, or possibly the future. Jon very nearly reaches for her hand, wanting to feel some contact with her, wanting reassurance that her skin is warm and alive no matter what the rumors tell.

“Why did you not return to Winterfell?” he asks. Immediately the warmth on her face disappears, her eyes becoming shuttered and hard, but Jon continues, needing to say the words that have circled inside his head for days now the same way that he’s circled her, getting closer and closer and wanting to be closer still. “Robb is the King in the North now, Sansa, he-”

“I know what he is,” she interrupts, the words clipped and sharp. Jon bites his tongue and waits for her to answer, but she never does.

***

He should leave it be. She’s been through enough, she doesn’t need her former bastard brother hectoring her like a determined terrier. But Jon can’t set such things aside. They are too big and unwieldy, too difficult to hide by sweeping them under a rug. So he persists, searching for answers, trying desperately to ask some question that will have an answer he understands to explain why she stays alone in this icy wasteland rather than return to the place she once called home.

“You could still marry,” Jon says one night as they dine alone in her freshly appointed chambers – appointed with no more than a rush mattress with a ticking made from spare cloaks and two rude chairs that barely hold their weight, true, but in possession of a roof and a door, making them more lavish than anything that existed before Jon and his men came. “A match could be made, Sansa, Robb would-”

“Robb left me to the vipers,” she spits, suddenly seeming every inch the Ice Queen she’s rumored to be.

“He…” Jon stammers, searching for the words to defend the very action he has trouble forgiving Robb himself. “Sansa, it was…”

“Do you excuse him?” she demands. “Would you have done the same in his place?”

“I would have come for you,” Jon says, so quietly it’s nearly a whisper. His words seem to break her in some way, her body sagging for a moment, her shoulders hunching up towards her ears.

“And what man would have me?” she continues as if he’d not spoken, her hand a clenched fist around her cup, pink flags in her cheeks from wine or temper or some combination of both. “A ruined woman? Or did you think me still a maid, Jon?” An unaccustomed bitterness creeps into her voice, one entirely foreign to the memory of Sansa that still lives in Jon’s head, even as it’s subsumed by the woman he’s coming to know. She stands, setting her cup down with a stiff control that betrays her anger.

“I didn’t-” he starts, but she waves him aside with an imperious motion, her haughtiness only barely concealing the depth of her pain.

“I’m sorry to disabuse you of such a romantic notion, Jon, but disabuse you I must. The first was a woman, to make it even better.” She turns to him, her voice softening, love and grief warring with the anger on her face. “A Stone of the Vale. Are you surprised? She was a bastard like you, Jon. Just like you, with black curls and the kindest heart.” Her hand hovers in the air as if to touch his face and suddenly Jon finds his heart is racing, thrumming in his chest like a horse’s hooves at gallop. Then her hand drops and her mask drops into place with it, her face assembling itself into cold neutrality. 

“Petyr sent her away when he discovered us. Now I don’t know if she lives or dies. I’ve lain with men, Jon. Each one only made me colder. I’m as cold and dead as they say I am.” Now it’s not anger in her voice, but anguish, a desperate plea that resonates in every fiber of Jon’s body, until it’s as if he’s a bell struck. He pushes to his feet, barely aware of his movements, knowing only that he must make her know the truth.

“No,” he says, more sharply than he’d intended. He takes hold of her arms just above her elbow, some inward part of him marveling at how automatically her hands settle on his chest, her fingers plucking at his tunic with such small, sad desperation that it could break his heart. “You’re alive, Sansa. You’re warm and alive and real.”

The sound that vibrates in her throat is that of a wounded animal, and then she’s in his arms, pressed against him, her mouth is finding his and Jon knows that there is no going back, not ever again.

Her kiss is a revelation. It’s a discovery, an exploration, a conquest. Jon captures her face with both hands, spreads his fingers wide and gives her everything he has, everything he is or ever will be. He breathes her name into her lungs, presses it into her skin with lips and tongue, over and over, _Sansa, Sansa, sweetest Sansa._

“Make me warm, Jon,” she whispers against his lips. “Make me alive.” 

Jon knows he’ll die trying.

***

He sends his men back the next day, bidding them ride for Castle Black. Sansa stands and watches as they pack up, Jon directing them and relaying instructions, penning a message in his own hand for Sam, a letter denying the myth of this Ice Queen beyond the Wall. 

“And you, Lord Snow?” one asks, as they’re saddled and ready, the first riders already on the path and riding South.

“I’ll be along soon,” Jon says, forcing himself not to avert his eyes, knowing every word is a lie and caring less than he thought he would. “I’ll follow in a few days.”

The ranger seems to take it as genuine. He nods, looking back at Sansa to touch his fingers to his forehead respectfully, and then they ride out of the yard and on to the path, the last remnants of Jon’s old life cantering out of view. Jon waits until he can’t see them or hear them, until the pounding of his heart subsides. He waits to feel regret, to reconsider.

He’s still waiting when he feels Sansa at his side, her small hand slipping into his and tugging him to follow her inside the keep that’s now her home. And his.


	2. The Other Side of Someday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Trigger warning for an attempted (but unsuccessful) assault.**

It is as if everything inside of her is melting. As if she is the North itself, thawing at the first touch of summer, ice cracking and dripping away, from skin to muscle to the very marrow of her bones. When she is with Jon, Sansa feels as if the world around them should be melting just as she is, all the ice and snow evaporating into mist from the fire he kindles inside her. Everything is more vibrant, more dire, more sweet and more painful, simply _more_. She had not known she was quite so frozen until she began to thaw.

It very nearly stings, like the prickle of sensation flooding back into a limb that had been asleep. It’s as well she’s been mostly alone until now, the wildling women who live farther along – freefolk, she corrects herself, as that’s just what they are and now she is one of them – having incorporated her into a unseen net of support, sometimes leaving game on Sansa’s doorstep in the night to augment her own meager foragings and keep her from starvation. She did not miss their company then, nor does she now. She’s not fit for such company, not with such sudden shifts of emotion. If she had expected Jon to be thrown by her tears, or to quail at her fits of rage, she would have been disappointed. He only ever looks at her with soft eyes, absorbing the power of her anger and accepting the offer of her kisses with equal focus.

He has shared her furs since that first night, after the ranging party rode south to the Wall without Jon among their number. Neither had spoken of his choice, nor what it meant. He is simply here, with her, and for the first time the long nights are a gift instead of a curse.

“Beautiful,” he murmurs as he rubs his bristled cheek against hers, as he tastes her mouth and her throat and the notch of her collarbones. “Sweet, clever girl.” None are words she hasn’t heard, but from his lips they seem new and bright and true in a way they’ve never been before. “Sweetest Sansa. My sweet, lovely Sansa.”

His hands feel as new and bright as his words, skimming over her body, finding all her secrets. For many nights, he only touches her through her shift, learning her swells and dips in the warm cocoon of her furs. Slowly, their explorations grow, until they’ve known each other in nearly every way but a few: he has kept his mouth to her lips and throat and breasts, and she’s done the same to him, and he has not yet lain with her fully. He’d told her that she would know when she was ready. It had made her angry. It had made her cry. It had made her pathetically grateful that he alone among all men would give her a choice. It had made her heart swell almost painfully with feeling for this man who had once been her bastard half-brother.

She hesitates to call it love. So many things she’s loved have been taken from her.

There are new men now, men who seem more wildling than freefolk when they come to the tiny keep that Jon and Sansa have made together. They’re not of those who’ve been here since Sansa found her way north, a group made mostly of women and elders who scratch out an existence in the even more barren wood past here. No, these men are strangers, true wild men, brought here by the same rumors that brought Jon to her and kept here by the steel that Jon trades, steel salvaged from the wreckage of Craster’s old hall and repaired as much as Jon is able. They unsettle her, the weapons and the men who come to trade for them. Both are remnants of her former life and she wants little to do with them, but still, she and Jon must eat and so Sansa must deal with one and attempt to ignore the other.

Most of them men leave her be, persuaded, no doubt, by the great bristling direwolf constantly at her side. Some, however, are bold. They call to her as she crosses the yard, making the sort of noises meant to coax an animal closer. They laugh when she glares at them, they holler when she ignores them. The threats they make are not for her ears, and she can’t quite pick out the words, but Sansa has learned how to recognize that tone in a man’s voice. Jon would send them scattering if she called him; he might even kill them where they stand. But Sansa doesn’t want to need a man for protection, not ever again. Not even a good and true man such as Jon.

She is gathering a pail of clean snow one day near dusk, thinking longingly of the bath she hopes to have that night, when one of the men corners her, breeches already down when she whirls to face him. For once, Ghost isn't with her, the great beast having gone hunting only an hour before. The man before her is the one exposed, but it's Sansa who feels naked without Ghost at her side to protect her. Deliberately, challengingly, the wildling strokes the cock already in his hand, his grin unsettling in contrast to the baseness of his actions. Setting her chin, she attempts to move past him. His body is soft and gone to fat, but he is surprisingly quick, and before Sansa can draw breath to shout, he has her pinned to the ground, his breath sour and rancid against her face as he yanks at her skirts.

She does not mean to half geld him. She’d only been fumbling for her knife, trying to bring it between them and drive him off. Even after he blanches and howls, it takes her a long moment to realize what had happened, but when she sees him clutching at himself, blood bubbling dark and red between his knuckles, a primal satisfaction sweeps through her strongly enough to make her hands shake in a way they hadn’t while she was being attacked.

She scrambles to her feet and points her knife at him, distantly noting the way his blood drips from the blade and spatters the snow, each drop leeching out into a halo of pink. The man rocks and shakes, panicked moans issuing from his now-pale lips. Deciding herself, Sansa strides forward and fists a hand in his hair, jerking his head back and setting the knife to his throat, waiting for his eyes to widen in realization, waiting for him to see her and know.

“I am what they say I am,” she tells him, her voice a low growl she does not recognize. “You tell them that. You tell them all that any man who comes near me will die and die badly. Do you understand?”

He nods, frantically, hands still clutching his mutilated flesh. Idly, Sansa thinks that next time, she’ll be sure to cut clean through. One less cock in the world to deal with. She looses the man’s hair and shoves him away, stepping around him to fetch her pail.

“Go,” she says, sparing one last look at him over her shoulder. “Tell them.” Then she leaves him there to his whimpers, not caring if he bleeds to death in the snow.

Jon is asleep when Sansa returns to the keep, a fire roaring in the grate nearby. He’s taken to napping some afternoons, exhausted from rising before sunup and working through the day. Most days Sansa joins him. This day she sheds her gown and her shift, until she is as bare as her nameday, clad only in the fall of her hair. He does not wake when she throws the furs aside, nor when she drops to straddle him, the rough weave of his breeches against her sensitive flesh making her gasp. It’s the knife at his throat that has his body tensing into readiness. For a moment, she fears that he’ll boil instinctively into violence; perhaps some part of her would welcome it, a fitting way to die after the life she’s lived and how helpless she’s been at the hands of others. But she remembers the wildling, remembers that it is his blood on the knife she holds to Jon’s throat now, and for once in her life she feels some small shred of power within her grasp.

Jon’s eyes fix on hers in the firelight, his body relaxing despite the blade still at his throat, his hands coming up instinctively to settle on her waist where her body seems to curve perfectly to fit them. The knife in her hands could be a feather for all the attention he pays to it. For long moments, they only stare at each other. She wills him to know her heart, to know _her_. Then at last his hands begin to move.

He wastes no time, seeming to know that she has no interest or need for seduction. His thumb finds the knot of flesh between her thighs, a place no other man has ever cared to touch before him, only Mya and Sansa herself exploring her body so. Jon is no other man. He watches her face in rapt silence as she writhes and rocks into his touch, his face openly worshipping.

The blade traces a thin, red line across his throat as her hand falls away – the wildling’s blood or his own? Sansa couldn’t say. Her own touch has never made her feel so wild, the friction has never felt so delicious that Sansa could nearly despair. The knife drops to the furs beside Jon; it’s with her last rational thought that Sansa bats it away where it can cut no more flesh. Then she gives herself over to him, rocking her hips to his touch so shamelessly that she could be another person, a different Sansa who wants and takes and burns.

Everything dissolves into a haze, a great red blur of feeling and sensation. His hands grip her hips so tightly she gasps. Both hands, she realizes, but then what still creates this deep magic between her thighs? When she realizes it’s her own movements, that she’s wantonly dragging her hips over the hardness she feels beneath his breeches and rutting against him like an animal, it releases any tether that might still have attached her to the world of rules and propriety that she’d once inhabited. This world has only pleasure, so deep and desperate that Sansa feels tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. She braces her hands on Jon’s chest, letting her head drop forward to curtain them both in the fall of her hair, glowing now in the firelight and bathing Jon’s face and chest in warm light. She _uses_ him, caring for nothing but the sweet pleasure she feels mounting in the deepest parts of her as she fairly grinds against him.

Her fingernails pierce the skin of his chest when she comes in a long, rolling peak, her entire body jerking with each pulse of pleasure. Jon steadies her erratic hips with one hand and winds the other around a hank of her hair, pulling her closer with gentle pressure as she continues to shiver and throb with bliss. When he would pull her down to lie beside him as he’s done so many nights, sleeping next to her without a thought for his own pleasure, she shakes his hands away, shifting down on his thighs to tug free the lacings on the placket of his breeches with trembling hands.

When he opens his mouth to speak, she stays whatever words he might have with her fingers at his lips. “This is mine,” she wants to tell him, but she focuses instead on freeing him from his breeches.

There is little difference between his anatomy and that of the wildling’s, Sansa knows, but still she thinks every part of him is beautiful, even his cock. She wraps her hand around it, stroking her fist up his length and reveling in the power she feels when he shudders and drops his head back to the furs, his fists clenching violently at his side. He is entirely vulnerable to her; she could geld him even more effectively than she had the wildling and Sansa half thinks he might actually let her if only she asked. His trust is nearly as pleasurable as his touch. 

He is not the first man to be inside her, but he is the only man that matters. Sansa sinks down onto him slowly, adjusting to the feel of him. She’s never had the luxury of going so slow before. But then she’s never wanted to make it last either. Jon allows her to move, his control over himself so fierce that the tendons at his neck stand out and a dull flush stains his chest. She twists and circles and squeezes, wanting to try everything, wanting all of him. To her mingled satisfaction and disappointment, he loses himself before she’s half done, his hips pushing up into her with such force that he lifts them both off the ground. A man’s seed; that’s something that _hasn’t_ been inside her and it shocks her how much she wants it now, how the thought of carrying Jon’s child hits her like an arrow shot into her heart, sunk up to the fletching.

He pulls her up then, dragging her up his chest the moment he’s done so he can pull her astride his face. Sansa bucks in surprise, then moans, her fingers sinking into his hair and tightening into fists. He doesn’t seem to care at the mess, at his release and hers mingled on her flesh. He seems to have no thought but tasting her, devouring her, driving her to another release with such single-minded devotion that Sansa could weep.

“Gods,” she pants, shivering out her pleasure against his mouth, spreading her knees as far as she can to get closer to him. “Yes, please.” They’re the only words either of them has spoken yet, but they seem fitting – for what he does now with his tongue, for everything he is, for the life they’ve built together.

Later, when she lies boneless on his chest with his hands straying idly through her hair and along her spine, he makes a tentative sound before opening his mouth to speak.

“Am I stolen now?” he asks. Sansa tips her head back to look at him. She should ask if he wishes to be. She was a lady once. Once, long ago, in a time when he was her brother and she let others make her choices for her.

“You’re mine,” she tells him instead. It is not a choice anyone would condone. Indeed, perhaps that’s part of why she makes it. She is beholden to nothing and no one and she’ll have what she chooses for herself, others be damned to every hell of gods or man. “You’re stolen and you belong to me.”

She kisses him fiercely, almost painfully. He does not protest. Sansa thinks Jon wishes to have what he chooses for himself as well, and the knowledge that he chooses her is like a second arrow sunk deep in her heart.

“You are the Night’s King now,” she says.

“The Night’s King?” he echoes absently, the hand on her spine slipping down to trace the curve where thigh meets buttock.

“One of Old Nan’s stories,” she reminds him. “A Lord Commander of old deserted the Night’s Watch for a woman with skin as white and as cold as ice.” Jon tenses beneath her.

“A White Walker,” he breathes.

“I think so, yes. They ruled the Nightfort together as King and Queen until the King in the North and the King-Beyond-the-Wall defeated them.”

“He was a Stark,” Jon says, remembrance coloring his voice. “The Night’s King. He was a Stark, wasn’t he?” Sansa nods against his chest, tucking her head beneath his chin as they both weave together the pieces of the past and the present. As they both imagine a possible future.

“Brother against brother,” Jon murmurs. “Did they live? The Night’s King and his White Woman.” Sansa doesn’t answer. Words fill the empty space around them, answering him as clearly as anything Sansa could say would have.

“They’ll take you from me,” she whispers, her hand spread over Jon’s chest, fingers slotting neatly into the shallow grooves between his ribs. “They’ll come to take you from me if you don’t go back where you belong.” The words feel like crushed glass in her throat. As thoroughly as pleasure took hold of her less than a half hour ago, so now does grief and sorrow, bringing hot tears to her eyes. Gently, Jon rolls her to her back and settles atop her, kissing away her tears and licking them from the corners of her mouth.

“I belong here,” he says, softly but fervently. 

“Jon…”

“I belong here,” he repeats, as if she hadn’t spoken, his lips at the hinge of her jaw and at the hollow behind her ear. “And here.” A kiss dropped on the curve of her shoulder, his tongue tracing over the side of her breast. “And here.” The blunt serration of his teeth at the swell of her abdomen. “And here,” he says one more time, the tone of his voice reverent and ardent as he shoulders her knees apart to settle between them and taste her again, his tongue bringing back pleasure as quickly as sorrow chased it away.

“Oh,” she gasps, arching back into the furs, shocked anew at the bliss of his tongue on her.

“I’m not leaving,” he tells her, punctuating the words with his lips and tongue, with his teeth at the flesh of her thigh.

“There?” she asks, “Or me?

He huffs out a low laugh. “Either,” he answers.

“Please,” she begs, tears closing her throat even as her body hums with pleasure. “Stay with me. Don’t let them take you from me.”

“I belong here,” he vows, low and sure. And when he returns his mouth to her, Sansa could nearly believe it’s true.


	3. The End of All Things

The raven had come weeks ago. He’d assumed it was from Jon, as all letters from Castle Black were, and had been surprised at the unfamiliar hand. The message was brief – _Lord Commander Jon Snow has abandoned his post_ – but then it didn’t need elaboration. Robb’s duty was clear, one of the few things in his life of late to be so. Still, he’d delayed. It was only when a second raven arrived that he’d set forth for the Wall, knowing he couldn’t shirk this duty or else lose all he’d lost so much to hold. What would his father have done, he wondered, when faced with such a duty? Would he have brought Jon to heel, grim-faced and tight-lipped, swinging the sword himself as honor demanded, as he’d done so many times before? It’s something Robb’s had time to think on during the long ride north, a ride both too long and not nearly long enough. He remembers the father he knew. Never once had Ned treated Jon as anything less than a son. Robb thinks perhaps Ned would have chosen family over duty. It does not lessen his conflict. The knot that’s lived in his stomach since the first raven arrived only grows with every plodding step of his horse’s hooves.

It would be easy to get lost here. So easy. Robb thinks of it a dozen times as he and his men ride farther and farther north of the Wall, going deeper into a wilderness the likes of which he’s never seen, not even in the deepest, darkest parts of the Wolfswood. A few wrong turns, some fruitless searching, and he could return to Castle Black empty-handed saying he couldn’t find Jon, something his men wouldn’t dare gainsay. Jon Snow would hardly be the first man of the Night’s Watch to go missing. 

A smaller, shameful part of him imagines getting lost in another way; losing himself, riding off from his men and never returning, shirking all duty and obligation, the same way Jon has done. It’s folly to even consider it. Robb is lord and liege of Winterfell, the King of the North. Jeyne is with child and nearing birth, finally, after losing three babes midway through pregnancy. He remembers how she was when he met her, the shy, sweet girl who’d been so eager to please, so responsive to his touch as they tried for an heir. The loss of those babes had changed her; the coupling that had once been sweet and devoted turned grim, determined, and Jeyne had turned grim and determined along with it. Deep down, Robb regretted bringing her North. The harsh cold of Winterfell is no place for a sweet spring flower like Jeyne Westerling to bud and bloom. Jeyne Stark seemed to be gnarling into barren branches and thorns. But he could hardly have ruled the North living in the South, so now he can only watch as the woman he’d forsaken so much for forsakes everything for him, for the child they’ll have who’ll inherit the North. Winterfell must have a lord, and so Robb presses on.

He’s no longer sure what to expect when he finds Jon. When they’d stopped at Castle Black, there had been talk of a Wildling with him, outlandish rumors of a woman icy and cold who brought death with a touch. Those had been rumors, though, easily-dismissed chatter passed about idly over horns of ale and during dull watches. The men who had ranged north with Jon and been with him up till his desertion were tight-lipped to a man, giving only the tersest of answers and confirming nothing, not even where Jon had left them, which itself seemed to confirm at least some of the rumors. Robb thought little enough of it; Jon had loved a Wildling once, a woman who died in battle at the Wall. They’d spoken of it in letters, Jon’s writing cramped and difficult to read as he told Robb what had passed since they’d parted. At first, the Jon reflected in the letters had seemed close enough to the half-brother Robb had known, but by the end, he was almost a stranger, so much so that each letter pained Robb further, until he hadn’t even opened the last one before the raven came to tell of Jon’s desertion.

Jon had broken his vows as a man of the Night’s Watch to love a woman once before. Leaving his altogether weightier duties as Lord Commander for a different woman seems unspeakable but not unimaginable.

Robb sees her first, after several days’ wandering ride from the Wall. Her hair is bright as torchlight in the midday sun, gleaming copper amid the white and brown all around her. For a moment, Robb’s heart stutters and he turns into a child again. “Mother,” the small boy inside him whispers. But no. His mother is dead, murdered by Freys and cast into a river. It took Robb and his men two days to find her body after they’d managed to fight their way free of the Twins. Her hair had been darkened by mud then, her flesh bloated and rent. She couldn’t be this whole person who carries buckets of water in the distance. Robb knows that. But even how she moves is familiar, so painfully familiar. 

Ghost appears at her side before Robb manages to recover himself. Grey Wolf comes alert with a short bark and he’s off like a bolt of lightning to join his littermate before Robb can even think to stop him. That’s when she looks up and Robb’s world takes yet another unexpected turn as the sight of her face strikes him like an arrow.

He’d come North to find a brother of the Night’s Watch, a man who felt blood brother to him still no matter the revealed truth of his parentage, no matter that men of the Night’s Watch renounced all blood kin. Instead he’d found a sister.

His steps feel leaden as he dismounts and moves towards her, heavy with shock and disbelief. She watches him come impassively, neither moving to meet him or turning away. When he reaches her, she inclines her head in painfully polite acknowledgement, as if they were in a finely appointed hall rather than a rock and snow strewn wilderness, as if they were two people of distantly neighboring houses rather than brother and sister. She doesn’t even call him by name; her voice is cool as she says “Lord Stark.” Lord, he notes, not King. Whether the omission is from habit or deliberate, Robb couldn’t say.

“Sansa,” he begins, even her name on his lips unwieldy and unaccustomed. The wolves bound about together between them, the bonds of pack stronger than the strains of their human family. The joyous reunion only puts the cool discomfort of Robb and Sansa’s own in bleak contrast. For all the tense stillness in his body, Robb’s heart leaps to see her, nearly as tall as he now, her face having bloomed into all the promised beauty of her youth but with a haunted quality entirely at odds with the happy songbird he knew before. She’s graceful, collected, but her hands betray her with a slight tremble. Robb wants to cover the distance between them and take her hands in his own. He wants to tell her everything is alright now, everything will be fine. But then he remembers why he’s here, and he knows he can’t lie to her. 

“Sansa,” he says again, not knowing what else to say. How long has it been since he’s said her name? So very, very long. A lifetime. Guilt curdles his happiness into something murky and strange.

“Come,” she says before he can speak further. “Jon will wish to see you.”

It’s then that Robb knows, though he couldn’t say quite how. She is no wildling woman; the crows who thought her so were mistaken. But they were not mistaken when they said Jon had taken her as his. It’s queerly less of a shock than finding out she’s alive had been, but still Robb reels from it.

Jon is emerging from a mean approximation of a keep when Robb sees him, looking as near like their father – like Robb and Sansa’s father – as Sansa looks like their mother, no longer the boy Robb had seen off in Winterfell so many years ago but a man, taller and broader and marked with scars. He seems not surprised to see Robb, but rather resigned, as if he’d been expecting – and dreading – Robb’s arrival for some time. He would have been, of course; Jon knows the dynamics of the North better than most anyone.

“A Stark King,” Sansa says to Jon in a strained parody of introduction. “Come to kill us as duty demands.”

“No!” Robb explodes, though he knows that her words are true, at least where Jon is concerned. Jon is a deserter. He knew the penalties when he chose to stay with Sansa. He understood the consequence. Robb understands them just as well; he knew them before he came here in search of him, but still part of him hoped for something else, some unnamed salvation to relieve Robb of the burden of such awful choice. That it’s Sansa Jon deserted for only makes the moral thicket thornier.

“Oh?” Sansa asks, a bittersweet smile curling just the corners of her mouth. “You come merely to visit?”

Helplessly, Robb looks at her; the last time he saw her, she was just a child, sweet and earnest and filled with hope. As far as Robb feels from the almost-child he himself was then, she seems a dozen times farther than he.

“Duty can wait,” Jon says after a silence so long and painful that Robb can’t believe it comes as part of his reunion with a brother he hasn’t seen in years and a sister he thought long dead. Sansa should be in Robb’s arms. The tears prickling at his eyes should be of joy. Jon’s voice is as soft as Sansa’s is brittle, as warm as hers is cold, as if he understands Robb’s torment, an understanding that only seems to twist the knife. His hand is bracing when he reaches out to clasp Robb’s elbow. “Come inside. You’ve ridden far and so have your men. Come in, rest. Eat and drink. I imagine you have questions.”

Jon’s wry smile shows his awareness of the inadequacy of such a statement. Robb has a sudden, fierce urge to be a boy again, a stripling of ten racing through the Wolfswood with Jon at his side, the two of them laughing and shouting, sure of their roles, with no idea of the hard realities of the lives that awaited them.

Well, those lives had stopped and turned aside – when Jon had taken the black, when Ned Stark had ridden South towards his early death and left his son a Lord and a commander of men long before his time – replaced by new lives altogether.

“Aye,” Robb says, all the sadness he feels in the word. A bitter laugh swells in his throat. “And I hope you have something far stronger than water to drink.”

Questions. They’re practically all Robb has. They’re not the sort that have answers, though, and the answers wouldn’t matter anyway. So Robb says nothing after he’s followed them inside, merely watching them quietly as they prepare a meager supper, just enough for the three of them. Robb’s men are camped southward, catching their own food as well as they’re able. Given the little Jon and Sansa have scraped together with far more time, no one will dine well tonight. It’s strange and disheartening. Life in Winterfell has always been somewhat austere, but there was a dignity to it, a deliberation entirely unlike this hardscrabble life they’ve made here. The girl that Sansa was – and still is, in Robb’s head, no matter how he tries to reconcile the woman before him with his little sister – would have shuddered delicately at such a situation. The girl who hated dirt on her hems now kneels on a packed dirt floor to stir a crude iron pot hanging over the fire that doesn’t even boast a hearth. Robb smiles to think of the Sansa of long ago peering into that cooking pot and wrinkling her nose in polite distaste.

“Does something amuse you?” Sansa asks. Robb braces himself for her bitterness, but she seems genuinely curious, and more than a little wistful. Perhaps her bitterness is not so much a weapon as it is an armor.

“I was thinking of how you used to love sweets,” he says, giving her a rueful smile. “I don’t imagine you’ve had any for quite some time.”

A faint smile lifts the corners of her mouth. For all the pain and anguish Robb’s had in his life, that smile almost seems the saddest thing he’s ever seen.

“No,” she says softly. “That was a different life.” He wants to ask if the life she has now is truly the life she wants, but something stays his tongue. He couldn’t save her when it mattered. It seems an insult to try to do it now.

They sup mostly in silence. Like a child, Robb allows himself a brief moment to play make-believe; they sit not in a frozen hovel but in the Great Hall, their wolves at their feet, even Lady. Their parents – Robb and Sansa’s; will he forever have to remind himself? – look on them with fond indulgence. They would have looked just like this, Robb realizes with a start as he watches Jon refill Sansa’s cup, his fingers resting on hers with casual intimacy as he steadies her hand. Robb’s mother and father might have looked just like this at the beginning of their marriage. And now they’re gone, never to return to Winterfell, never to greet the grandchild that rounds Jeyne’s belly.

Jon and Sansa could grow old here. But for the grim machinery of duty, they could grow older than Eddard and Catelyn Stark ever had, their hair graying, the skin around their eyes and mouths pleating with age. Perhaps they would even have children of their own. Robb can’t imagine it; he’s known they don’t share a father for long enough that the fact no longer surprises him, but Jon’s always been his brother in his heart. Sansa had always held herself apart from them, though, and Robb’s aware that he only knows a fraction of all she’s gone through since they parted. He’s certainly clung to love in circumstances far less bleak. And whatever else is between them, Robb can see for himself that there’s love. He sees it in the way they defer to one another, the way they look to each other before speaking, he sees it in their easy partnership that speaks of intimate familiarity.

Could their father still have swung the sword if he’d seen this? Could he have extinguished the dim ember of hope in his daughter’s eyes after so much suffering? Could he have done it knowing that it would extinguish the fragile new ember of hope in his own as well? There is no duty that demands Sansa’s death, but Robb has a queer feeling that Jon’s death would be little different than her own in Sansa’s mind. Were it done at Robb’s hand, he has no doubt she’d be as lost to him as if he killed her himself.

Robb stands so abruptly that his stool clatters to the floor. “Forgive me,” he mumbles, avoiding their gazes, “I need some air.” He rushes outside, ignoring the look they exchange. 

Grey Wind lopes up to meet him, Ghost on his heels. Robb takes in a great breath of bitterly cold air, holding it until his lungs burn. It plumes in the air before him when he exhales. He’d always thought Winterfell truly cold before coming north.

He wanders farther than he should, farther than he would have dared before the Others had been defeated. Grey Wind and Ghost prowl ahead of him, flushing a snowy white hair from its cover and chasing it through tree and scrub until they catch it and kill it, blood darkening their muzzles to black in the moonlight. It suddenly occurs to Robb to wonder what would happen to Ghost with Jon dead. Would the beast even let it happen? Would Robb have to kill him too? Could he? Another thing he never expected to have in common with his father. Good intentions and blood on his hands: the Stark legacy.

It’s long past midnight when he returns. Moonlight bathes the clearing around the keep, nearly as bright as the sun, a sharp contrast to the dimness inside so that Robb must stand still, blinking and waiting for his eyes to adjust. The fire is little more than banked embers, just enough to keep the bite of cold at bay. Jon and Sansa are curled together beside it, heavy furs pulled up to their shoulders. Jon’s hand rests over Sansa’s heart, her own curled atop it. Feeling more like an intruder than like family, Robb stands still for a small eternity, watching them. Her cheeks are pink even in the dim light, her lips bruised, her braid untidy, speaking volumes of shared intimacies, the last rites of lovers taken while Robb ranged the woods outside. It’s hard for him to imagine them sharing what he shares with Jeyne. But then, some things are meant to be accepted rather than understood.

They both jerk when he shakes them awake, Jon’s hand going instinctively to his sword, Sansa miraculously coming up with a dagger where none was before. It makes Robb want to weep. Whatever new lives they find upon leaving this place, Robb hopes they’re lives that let old habits such as these die.

“I’ll wait until dawn to rejoin my men,” he says. “That will give you time to be long gone. No one will question a fire. There are bones enough in this old place to stand up to inspection, should anyone care to confirm that the Lord Commander made his last stand here. I’ll set it once you’re gone to give it time to build.”

For a moment they only blink at him in confusion. Jon draws the thick mound of furs aside and gets to his feet, extending a hand to Sansa to help her as well. Her skirts are rucked up around her thighs and Robb feels his cheeks flame scarlet as he turns his face away, feeling more like an intruder than ever, like an uninvited witness to something sacred and profane all at once.

“None of my men will gainsay me,” he continues. “Your men at the Wall already protected you once. I’ve no doubt they’ll keep silent once again if they suspect you didn’t actually immolate yourself rather than face justice.” He gives Jon a wry grin, then he shrugs, feeling almost embarrassed. “I don’t see any other way.”

“Robb-” Jon starts, his face creased in a frown, as if he means to argue, the crazy fool. He’s always had more honor than sense. Sansa has enough sense for the both of them at least. She quiets Jon with a hand on his forearm, and then surprises Robb by stepping forward, her hands resting on his shoulders as she presses a sisterly kiss to each of his cheeks. Robb’s hands hover awkwardly, fluttering birds unsure whether to alight, and then she steps away and Jon pulls him into a rough embrace, his grip nearly strong enough to crack Robb’s ribs. Once Robb was the stronger of the two. So little of that lifetime remains.

It takes them only minutes to prepare, so few are their belongings. It’s all too fast, a horrible momentum carrying them towards the unknown that Robb knows is as necessary as it is painful. Once outside, they embrace again, all three of them, their foreheads pressed together and their mingled breath misting in the night. Then the two of them are away, picking through the trees towards the east, Ghost a pale wraith ahead of them. The beacon of Sansa’s hair reflects in the light of their torch, marking their path through the woods until it winks out, hidden by a hill or covered by her hood, perhaps. Robb watches long after they’re out of sight, seeing only shadow and moonlight where once he saw a brother and a sister. Then he sets to work, building fire in the hearth to a tremendous blaze before pulling down rushes from the roof and setting his torch to everything that will catch. The keep will be nothing more than a smoldering ruin come the dawn. When Robb rejoins his men, Jon Snow, the 998th Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch will be dead, along with his wildling ice queen. Sansa Stark was dead long ago.

Robb mourns as if it’s true. Wherever they go, whatever they do, they’ll no longer live as Jon Snow and Sansa Stark. But they’ll live. It’s so little, but at the same time it’s everything, it’s all that’s left for Robb to grant. It’s small comfort as he hunches against the wind and rides south towards his men, towards the Wall, towards Winterfell, away from death and towards the life he left behind.

Small comfort, perhaps, but even small comfort is so rare as to be precious.


End file.
